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Qt Compositor For Wayland Is Made

Phoronix: Qt Compositor For Wayland Is Made

If you head on over to the Nokia Labs Qt Blog there is a post about "multi-process Lighthouse", which is worth reading. It's written by Jørgen Lind about how up until now Qt has lacked a multi-process client/server solution, but now they are looking for the Wayland Display Server to fill this void. Jørgen and other Qt developers ended up writing "Qt Compositor", which is a Nokia Labs project for making Qt-based Wayland compositors...

But I don't understand what this news exactly means for Qt:
- Will Qt-Apps to be partially rewritten to work as native Wayland clients?
- How much would be the workload for KDE to run with plain Wayland?

if i understand this correctly this is a toolkit to create compositors based on the wayland protocol (and render in Qt) that will fit your use case better. ie a portable device screen etc.

the "official" wayland compositor will be aimed at general desktop use right?????

anyone care to explain it more?

Qt applications has always been able to run on Linux without X11, but this has previously required a recompilation of the application using a different version of Qt (Qt/embedded, aka Qtopia Core)

Lighthouse is an experimental branch of QtGui that makes the windowing system pluggable, to ease the porting of Qt to new windowing systems. It also makes it possible to pick whatever windowing system is available at runtime without recompiling anything.

Unfortunately QWS (the minimal windowing system included in Qt/embedded) could not be ported to Lighthouse, so the Linux Frame Buffer plugin to Lighthouse would only allow a single application to run at a time.

This recent work is writing a Lighthouse plugin talking the Wayland protocol, and a Wayland compositor using Qt. This means that with only Qt + the Wayland server you have a complete windowing system stack suitable for embedded devices where X11 is overkill.

Additionally it is more interoperable than the previous solution (QWS in Qt/embedded) in two ways:
First this minimal windowing system stack will allow you to mix in any non-Qt applications that speak the Wayland protocol, and secondly applications compiled for this stack will also work on wayland systems using a differnet (possible more featurefull but less lightweight) compositor, as well as on on X11 systems (using the X11 Lighthouse plugin).